Dr. Roger Chen Receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for 2025-2026 Academic Year

Dr. Roger Chen, an Associate Professor in the Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering Department (CECE) at UH-Manoa (UHM), has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in
Transportation Systems Engineering to Japan for the 2025-2026 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Dr. Chen will collaborate with Prof. Takanori Sakai, head of the Urban Freight Research Lab (URFL) at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology (TUMSAT), to pursue a research agenda with the goal of understanding the impacts of e-commerce on urban freight logistics planning and operations. With the support of the URFL, Dr. Chen will leverage geocoded location sensitive freight and commodity data in Tokyo to estimate econometric models of truck scheduling and route choice. The collaboration will develop pathways towards leveraging these models in a Tokyo version of SimMobility Freight, an agent-based urban freight simulation platform developed and used by UFRL.
The output from this Fulbright will allow Dr. Chen, Prof. Sakai and the UFRL to develop a longer-term collaboration that addresses issues and questions related to travel/activity and urban freight demand shifts resulting from growth in e-commerce and the development of an ICT-rich environment envisioned in Japan. These include approaches to leveraging the large volumes of data collected through multiple consistent platforms (e.g. ETC2.0, IC Transit Cards) to better explain and forecast personal and freight travel, in addition to gaining insight into how the two systems can improve. The recent COVID19 pandemic underscored the critical roles of e-commerce, travel/activity behaviors, and freight services for meeting household delivery needs. These are further accelerated with a future envisioned with big data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and robots intertwined with industry and society.
The CECE Department at UH-Manoa has a long history of Fulbright awardees, which include Prof. Phillip Ooi and Prof. Sayed Bateni.
Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. In the United States, the Institute of International Education implements the Fulbright U.S. Student and U.S. Scholar Programs on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit https://fulbrightprogram.org.